Cold War (2001)

by Tom - Power Plays 05 Clancy

  ". . . poor girl, she'd been better off in that cramped old flat we used to share when we was single. What good's his high job at the plant to her now? Or this high place, in the end tally . . ."

  Gorrie frowned at her latest repetition of what had become a tedious song. The "high place" was a suburban bungalow with a nice plot of green here on Eriskay Road, a short jaunt from the city center. The "high job," taking Christine Gibbon's comments backwards, was a supervisory waste-management position at the Cromarty Firth nuclear power plant over on Black Isle.

  ". . . tell you, officer, I knew it would come to tragedy. Better they'd gone their separate ways. I'm not one for dirty talk, but this man was one adulterous shit. Always figured he'd take a hand to Claire when he was in one of his moods, though I can't claim she declared it out and open. He'd got her so mousy intimidated, she kept everything bottled inside. And now the bottle's broke. What she did, she was pushed to do. Pushed, you can be confident. A hun'red times I told the poor girl . . ."

  As she dissolved into sobs, Gorrie phased her out, thinking there wasn't much more of relevance to be gotten from her. Hearsay aside, Christine Gibbons's account could be trimmed to a paragraph. She'd come to her friend's bungalow this morning in her automobile, the two of them having planned to strap the tyke into a carriage and go shopping down by the Ness. Because Mr. Mackay would occasionally take a ride to the plant with one of the other site-workers, it did not strike Christine as unusual to find his car in the drive. At any rate, she'd knocked on the door and got no answer. Knocked some more, no answer. Then she'd rung the bell. Still no one came to the door. All the while she could hear the child crying inside the house, which caused her some growing disturbance. After another ten minutes of knocking and bell-ringing, Christine let herself in with a spare key Claire had given her to use in a pinch, and called out from the entry hall, again without response. With her opinion of Mr. Mackay being what it was, and no sign of Claire, and the baby shrieking its lungs out, Christine's concern led her toward the nursery, at which point she passed the open bedroom door, was confronted with the sight of the two dead bodies, and rushed to phone the police, something she could not afterward recall having done in her trauma.

  The rest was distraught babble, and a free-flowing tirade of slurs and accusations against the deceased Mr. Mackay.

  Now Gorrie clicked the tip back into his pen and glanced out the bedside window. A newly arrived trio of official vehicles had joined the line of police cars that had preceded them into the front drive. A patrol cruiser led the pack. It was followed by a forensics van, and an ambulance. None of them had its flasher or siren on. The damage was done, they were in no hurry, why stir up the entire neighborhood?

  Gorrie watched the patrol car's driver and passenger doors swing open to break the horizontal orange stripes painted across both sides. Watched Robertson and a female social worker exit the car and start toward the house. Then he shifted his eyes to the ambulance at the rear, and watched the emergency medical technicians leave their vehicle for what was no longer an emergency at all, but rather a nasty cleanup job.

  Gorrie frowned again. The evidence would be collected and examined, the bodies taken to the morgue for autopsy, and the child passed on to relatives or foster care, depending on who was or wasn't out there in the world for him. Gorrie and his constables would conduct their follow-up inquiries of family, friends, and acquaintances. And when the case report was filed, his instincts told him it would be written up as an explosive domestic incident, the tale of a marriage gone as bad as they got, its last act an eternal mystery to everyone but the two who'd played it out here in the cold, violated intimacy of its setting.

  Better they'd gone their separate ways indeed.

  Feeling the sudden need for a breath of fresh air, Gorrie turned from the bed and went outside the house onto the lawn.

  FOUR

  PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 2, 2002

  MARC ELATA FOLDED HIS ARMS SO THAT HE HELD HIS elbows in the palms of each hand. He stood still before the statue as the American couple and their four-year-old brat--a four-year-old, at the Louvre!--staggered past him on the steps. Elata held his breath, willing himself past the moment, past their babble: "Do you think the Mona Lisa will smile for us?" said the father, as if the portrait were a carnival trick. The four-year-old whined about wanting more French fries, and when were they going to see a train?

  A tour group swelled up on the landing behind him, chattering in Swedish or something Nordic; Elata pushed himself to move on, following the Americans in their quest for the undying smile. If it weren't for the fact that he wanted to see several paintings--several master-pieces --displayed in the same room as the Mona Lisa, he might have pointed them in the proper direction as they continued up the stairs. This way he would have known where they were, making them easy to avoid.

  A thick knot formed in front of da Vinci's most famous painting; the crowd was a permanent feature of the room. Elata walked past it, glancing at the equally beautiful though far less famous da Vincis alongside, but not wanting to go near the rabble to admire them. He had Ucello and Pierro in mind; he had not thought about the Renaissance masters lately, and wanted to consider their problems of shade and perspective as an antidote to Picasso, whom he'd had so much of over the past seven days.

  An exceedingly fat French woman brushed against him as he walked. Elata stopped, gave her a nasty look--but she was oblivious, chattering to her almost equally rotund companion about the uselessness--inutile--of art. Elata spoke little French, and that word specifically might be interpreted as edging toward "vanity" rather than uselessness, but he had an ear for such conversations. He had heard them all his life, beginning at his own dinner table when he'd expressed his desire at age eight to become an artist.

  Which, despite everything, he had become. If a forger might be considered an artist.

  The human brain's ability to draw fine distinctions cannot be overstated, especially in the gray realm of morality and ethics. Elata's mind was particularly supple; it had no great difficulty justifying his actions. First and foremost, there was the need to survive; he had to eat. If he had come quite a distance from the days when he was truly starving--as the Rolex and privately tailored sports coat he wore over his jeans attested--that distance was not so great as to dim the memory.

  His second justification was that he was actually an artist. As such, he not only understood what the masters he imitated were doing, he extended it. Copying them had become part of his art, part of the great tradition of master and student that many of them had followed during their own apprenticeship. He learned their style and technique, then addressed himself to subjects as they would have. He did not copy paintings directly. If, when he was finished, others believed that the work on his easel had been done by the master himself, that was irrelevant to him. Elata himself never passed the paintings off as anything other than his own. And as far as he knew, those who sold them did not either.

  That this knowledge was a product of willful ignorance made no difference to him morally, even if it might make such baubles as the Rolex possible.

  And then there was the final justification, the grand and undebatable one--art itself. For art transcended all. It transcended da Vinci as surely as it transcended Marc Elata. It transcended Picasso, it transcended Elata's present employer and greatest patron, Gabriel Morgan. It endured and would endure, even if every work in this museum were burned tomorrow.

  Elata shuddered and turned abruptly, afraid that he had somehow inadvertently shared his thoughts with the rest of the room. But he had not. The tourists continued to wander through like cows grazing in a field.

  He glanced at his watch. Still another three hours to kill.

  Elata had not come to Paris to prepare himself for another round of paintings. His job was quite different--Morgan had hired him to detect a forgery rather than produce one.

  Elata had done this sort of thing before. He had examined a Giotto supposedly passed down from the N
azis, steering Morgan away because of a tint under one of the eyes--a careless trick in an otherwise competent job. He had stuck to his opinion despite the arguments of two academic authenticators; in the end, Morgan had listened to him and passed on the painting, though not without regret. The painting had subsequently surfaced in an Australian collection, where a fresh and rather destructive laboratory analysis of it had denounced it as a fake--a careless piece of priming gave it away.

  From that point on, Morgan insisted on Elata viewing every important piece he bought. Or so Morgan claimed, though Elata suspected that he did not. But the fact that he said so increased the pressure; the forger turned authenticator feared greatly making a mistake. Morgan no doubt considered this as big an incentive as his sizable fees.

  Morgan did not rely on psychology or money alone. He made sure his expert was supplied with the proper tools to aid his judgment. In this case, he had arranged for Elata to receive a small piece of paper containing a sketch and swatch of paint. The fact that this piece of paper--a letter by Picasso, exceedingly rare because it contained a description and rough sketch as well as a dab of paint--belonged not to Morgan but to the Musee Picasso was of no consequence to Elata's conscience, though it necessitated certain physical arrangements, this trip to Paris the primary one.

  Elata folded and unfolded his arms, moving through the Louvre gallery. He had hoped looking at the paintings would consume some of his nervous energy, but it was no use. He was due at the Musee Picasso at precisely 2:10; he did not wish to arrive early and inadvertently draw attention to himself, but he had difficulty throttling his energy. He was not a patient man. He could not pretend to be a patient man. As a painter he attacked, he sprinted, he moved at the speed of thought; it could be an asset in art, but in life it made for rising blood pressure and insatiable boredom. It took his attention from the de Vries sculpture of Mercury and Psyche as he passed down the steps and out through the halls into the courtyard and park, helplessly propelled by his surging adrenaline.

  "Deux," said the voice in her ear. Then it repeated itself in English for her benefit. "Two in position."

  Nessa Lear watched from across the street, her vision partly obscured by wandering crowds, as their subject continued through the Tuileries garden toward Avenue du Gl. Lemonier. The American was tall, and the dark, well-cut jacket he habitually wore over a gray T-shirt and acid-washed jeans made him easy to keep track of. The fact that he seemed not to know he was being followed or even suspect it made things even easier.

  Of course, it was also possible he was not planning on doing anything worth being followed for. "Doigts," the French teammates on her Interpol task force called him. "Fingers." They had given the name to Monsieur Elata for the incredible adroitness and adaptability of his painting strokes, for they believed he was responsible for forgeries ranging from a Rembrandt sketch to an early Matisse study. But the American had never been positively linked to the works--many of which were not even positively identified as forgeries. Elata had arrived in Paris yesterday afternoon, and had so far done nothing any other tourist would have done. He had sped through D'Orsay in the day yesterday, and Notre Dame in the evening, just as he had rushed through the Louvre today. Assuming the French had no law demanding that museum visits be of a certain duration (they might), he had done nothing wrong.

  "Un moment. Merde," cursed one of the team members. Nessa leaned around a stopped truck and peered toward the park. Elata had stopped at a vendor and was buying a sandwich. The tail had to continue past. Nessa would have to take over.

  She moved forward. She'd been on the job officially less than a week, not counting the skimpy orientation period, and so didn't know much of Paris yet, but that made her seem like the perfect tourist; acting lost would not be difficult, and she wouldn't have to work hard at mispronouncing her French.

  Elata wolfed the jambon--actually, a ham with cheese on a small French roll--then walked down in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg. He still had more than two hours to kill. He thought of going up to Montmartre, but had been warned by Morgan, absolutely warned, not to go near the Feu Gallery, where he had deposited several works during his last visit some months before.

  So what was he to do? He stopped for a moment in the park, rubbing the heel of his boot against the yellow pebbles. He gave his eye over to the forms and colors passing by him--thick weaves of wool and puffed nylons, blue wedges, and green tweed. It was warm for March, but still it was March; if it had been May perhaps, he might have feasted on the figures. But late winter dulled the forms; there was nothing to divert him.

  After this was over--after Zurich, where there were sure to be more delays--he'd reward himself with a trip to Florence and perhaps Rome. He might take a few weeks and do some of his own work, play with a few sketches, before taking up the other projects he'd agreed to.

  But how to kill these two hours?

  He saw the Metro entrance ahead, and reached into his pocket for the carnet of tickets he had purchased upon arriving yesterday. Nothing like the subway for wasting time.

  "Buggers," Nessa muttered to herself. Then she raised her voice to read the name of the Metro station, making sure the microphone tacked below her collar could pick it up and broadcast it to her companions.

  Plunging down the stairway, she broke into a trot trying to find her subject. Jairdain should be coming down the other side somewhere--she looked for him as she jostled the contents of her purse for a Metro ticket.

  They'd foreseen this, talked about it, planned for it, and yet here she was, nearly falling to pieces.

  Inside, the place was a maze. Left or right at the tunnel intersection? There were different lines traveling in cross directions.

  Jairdain would take one, but which?

  "Go right," he said in her ear.

  "Oui. Thank you." Nessa turned and trotted onward, craning her neck upward, ducking around a small pack of Korean tourists. A man with a suit was walking about twenty meters ahead. Music filtered in from the platform beyond the access, then the soft rush of the rubber-wheeled train arriving.

  "Damn," she said, throwing herself into a run.

  Too late. The rush had been of the train leaving, not arriving.

  Nessa was so busy cursing herself she almost bumped into the tall, thin American standing in front of the advertisement for the Louvre at the end of the platform. He held his elbows in his palms like an X across his chest, and frowned at her severely as she recovered her balance.

  Crisscrossing aimlessly on the subway lines, Elata arrived finally at Sully-Morland with only a half hour more to kill. He came up from the Metro and walked down the Rue de Birague, turning toward the Maison de Victor Hugo, the home of the famous author, which had been turned into a museum.

  He glanced at his watch. Though less than five minutes had passed since he had emerged from the subway, fear paralyzed him--he was going to be late. He turned and began running, streaking across the Place des Vosges, dodging the strollers like a madman. He ran up Rue de Turenne, bolting through traffic. Elata ran every day at home, but rarely this hard; he reached the Musee Picasso with fifteen minutes to spare.

  He was at the far end of the ground floor, studying the greens of Woman Reading when the fire alarm sounded. By then he had caught his breath. He walked down the steps deliberately, went straight as directed by the guards, down another flight, moved back, turned left, and found the steps.

  A woman in her thirties pushed into him. Her strong perfume caressed his nose. He felt her push the envelope into his pocket; he slipped it into his breast pocket and continued to walk, once more following the guards' directions.

  There were sirens outside, police and fire trucks arriving, someone yelling that they had seen smoke in the basement, someone else swearing there was smoke in the back gallery of the first floor--both were correct, as it happened, though in neither case would the small devices emit enough agent to damage the museum or its treasures.

  Elata ignored the rushing firemen
and the crowd gathering on the sidewalk. A taxi was just reaching the curb. He pushed past two tourists who had queued for it, ignoring their protests as he threw open the door and jumped in. The taxi lurched away without pause; its driver knew already where he was to take his passenger.

  Jairdain slammed his hands on the trunk of the car as Nessa reached the curb.

  "J'suis dans la merde," said the French Interpol agent.

  Pierre ran up to him, immediately joining in the coarse denouncing of their fate.

  "Calm down," Nessa told them when she arrived.

  "To have lost him here," said Jairdain before cursing again.

  "Easy now, lads," she said. "Someone in the museum passed him something when the alarm sounded. We've just got to track it down."

  "Oui?" said Pierre. "Who?"

  "There was a woman on the steps, two guards, and someone who looked like a tourist," she told them. "We'll hunt down the tourist first. She's the only one likely to get away."

  Zurich, Switzerland

  Gabriel Morgan had seen both great opportunities and great trials in his life, but the torture he faced presently must surely rank among the most acute. For here he was, in one of Zurich's newest and finest restaurants--A, which might stand for America, or the beginning of the alphabet, or anything else one wished--and he could not, or should not, choose from any of the excellent entrees. Not American wild duck in a blueberry-tarragon sauce, which carried with it unadvertised hints of mustard and sherry. Not the exotic but somehow pleasing foie gras soup peppered with ostrich bits in sake with white bean coulis and red pepper tortillas. Not even the deceptively simple sole in vermouth, which was built from a beurre blanc that would have left Escoffier speechless.

  Morgan could have none of these dishes. Or rather, he could have any of them, if he was prepared to pay the price. His intestines had plagued him intermittently over the past six or seven months; the doctors offered different theories and countless remedies, though their advice came down to the same thing: eat plainly. No cream sauces, no spices, no exotic meats. They would prefer that he stay out of restaurants entirely, but if he must go, he should order something simple--baked capon, with no spices, no sauce, no salt, no pepper, no skin. They might just as well have told him not to have sex.